28 .... t; nH " , .. ,\ \ tf1 J ,---- . ' , ':./ 8 ;,. J .,. .,. . i \ \: ";: ' . " , ' ' .' , , " ' ,.,' :; " , f ::::.. < '''@. --., /: r <,. "''t l -Q 'I ì 1 i t, t, \ , t\ 11 :1 \ , ...... f:ev ,v gnac. Carlos .,Argentino tasted it, judged 1t "interesting," and, after a few glasses launched on a vindication of modern man. "I evoke h;m," he said with rather inexplicable animation, "in his studio- laboratory, In the cit)'s watchtowers, so to say, supplied with telephones, tele- graphs, phonographs, radio-telephone apparatus, cinematographic equipment, magic lanterns, glossaries, timetables, compendiums, bulletins. . . ." He remarked that for a man of such faculties the act of travel was useless. Our twentieth cen tur} had transformed the fable of Mohammed and the mountain; the mountains, now, con- verged upon the modern Mohammed. His ideas seemed so inept to me, their exposition so pompous and so vast, that I immediately related them to litera- ture; I asked him why he did not write them down. Foreseeably, he replied that he had already done so; these con- cepts, and others no less novel, figured in the Augural Canto, or, more simply, the Prologue Canto, of a poem on which he had been working for many years, without publicity, wIthout any deafening to-do, putting his entire reli- ance on those two props known as work and solitude. First he opened the flood- gates of the imagination, then he made use of a sharp file. The poem was titled "The Earth;" It consisted of a descrip- tion of the planet, wherein, naturally, there was no lack of picturesque digres- sion and elegant apostrophe. I begged him to read me a passage, even though brief. He opened a drawer )(II .:3 JJ - : ------ , '.... þ " -""- , 1.. .. " in his desk, took out a tall bundle of pages from a pad, each sheet stamped with the letterhead of the Juan Crisós- tomo Lafin ur Library, and, with so- norous satisfaction, read out: "1 have seen, like the Greek, the cities of men and their fame, Their labor, days of various light, hunger's shan1e ; I correct no event, falsify no name, But the voyage 1 narrate is . . . autour de ma chambre." "By all lights an interesting strophe," he opined. "The first line wins the ap- plause of the professor, the academi- cian, the Hellenist, if not of superficial pedants, who form, these last, a con- siderable sector of public opinion. The second passes from Homer to Hesiod (the en tire verse an implicit homage, writ on the façade of the resplendent building, to the father of didactic po- etry), not without rejuvenating a pro- ced ure w hose lineage goes back to Scripture, that of enumeratiun, con- geries, or conglomeration. The third line- Baroquism? Decadentism? Puri- fied and fanatical cult of form? -is composed of two twin hemistichs. The fourth, frankly bilingual, assures me the unconditional support of every spirit sensitive to the gay lure of graceful play. I say nothing of the rare rhyme, nor of the learning which permits me- without any pedantry! -to accumu- late, in four lines, three erudite allu- sions encompassing thIrty centuries of compressed literature-first to the Odyssey, second to 'Works and Days,' third to the immortal bagatelle prof- JANUARY 7, I 9 b 7 " -, J x ^ ^" ., "'; ( ,$c :r t aw 11at' s a debenture?" . . fered us through the idling of the Sa- voyard's pen. Once more I have under- stood that modern art requires the balsam of laughter, the scherzo. Decid- edly, Goldoni has the floor! " He read me many another stanza, each of which obtained his approbation and profuse commentary, too. There was nothing memorable in any of them. I did not even judge them very much worse than the first one. There had been a collaboration, in his writing, be- tween application, resignation, and chance; the virtues which Daneri at- tributed to them were posterior; I real- ized that the poet's labor lay not with the poetry but with the invention of reasons to make the poetr} admirable. Naturally, this ulterior and subsequent labor modified the work for him, but not for others. Daneri's oral style was extra vagan t; his metric heaviness hin- dered his transmittIng that extrava- gance, except in a very few instances, to the poem.* O NLY once in my life have I had occasion to examine the fifteen thousand dodecasyllabic verses of the *1 recall, nevertheless, the following lines from a satire in which he harshly fustigated bad poets: This one. gives his poetn bellicose armonngs Of erudition; that one puts in pomp and jubilee. Both in vain beat their ridiculous vvings . . . Forgetting, the \"'fetches, the factor BEAUTY! Only the fear of creating for him<;elf an army of l111placable and powerful foes dissuaded him (he told n1e) from fearlessly publishing this poem.